As far back as 2004 the seeming contradiction of publicly-funded research made only available at prohibitive cost through journals, has attracted the attention of HE leaders and policy makers. In July of that year, journalist Donald MacLeod reported on what MPs were calling "a revolution in academic publishing, which would make scientific research freely available on the internet".

At the time, Sir Keith O'Nions, director general of the research councils, said: "I think it would be a pretty brave decision of the government at the present time to say it has sufficient confidence in the open access business model ... to shift rapidly from something it knows and trusts to an open access model." And there the case rested.

Fast forward to present day, the near ubiquitous use of social media, the growth of the 'copyleft' movement which seeks to allow work to be shared more freely and a blog by a Cambridge mathematician announcing that he would no longer be submitting papers to Elsevier, the largest publisher of scientific journals, and the Academic Spring was born.

The following articles trace the development of the discourse across the Guardian:

But while the weight of the academic community and government seems to be behind this move toward open access in academic publishing, not everyone supports the academic spring. On the blog, the Scholarly Kitchen, Kent Anderson, CEO/publisher of the Journal of Bone & Joint Surgery and former director of Medical Journals at the American Academy of Pediatrics, calls the Academic Spring "shallow rhetoric aimed at the wrong target."